For Shy Child, synth-pop short-circuits the space between unreality and truth, the artificiality of its expanses allowing a sort of wide-eyed honesty that naturalism forecloses. That bittersweet sincerity sticks much harder than Liquid Love's sleek surfaces would ever suggest.

In his own dogged, idiosyncratic way, he's keeping a neglected strain of dance music alive here, and while the joys are subtle, the more attention you give the mix, the deeper they feel.

Ring’s orchestral and electronic score communicates the narrative’s swing from complacent luxury to riveting despair, showing what happens when worlds collide.

That A Quiet Darkness doesn’t offer much in the way of immediate pleasure shouldn’t be entirely to its detriment, but this album doesn’t grow on you; it wears on you.

While it's hard to fault a band for branching out beyond their established template, the tidy electronic textures of Fantasy don't begin to match the mysterious depths of Lightning Dust's best work.

Albums recorded over ample stretches of time often don't hold together well, and Tonight is no exception.... Although one of the strengths of this album is that it's clearly coming straight out of a void, oblivious to anything else around it, there's also a childlike wonder coupled with a decent understanding of the gruesome side of life.

Bitter Rivals too often feels like a cheap thrill ride, firing on all cylinders but without any grand design.

If not all of Dub Thompson’s ideas work, the more important takeaway is that, at this early stage, they sound like a band with no lack of them.

For now, though, Kimbra's status as "That singer from the Gotye song" woefully underserves her full potential, but so does The Golden Echo.

This is an inspired collection of songs, even if you do get the feeling Hopkins prefers to spend his late nights alone.

Chrissybaby is 16 songs long, which might be more of this particular pleasant, low-stakes mood than you need at one uninterrupted stretch.

These lyrics threaten to drag the rest of the album down if you listen too closely, but Stephenson’s vocal melodies are buoyant enough to keep it all afloat if you’re playing this in the background.

He runs into trouble when he loses the self-awareness of it all. ... Ripe Dreams, Pipe Dreams finds its true comfort zone when it is simply sweet.

Since Bohemian Rhapsody is a soundtrack targeted at a wide audience, not an archival release suited for collectors, not all of the Live Aid performance is here; “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” and “We Will Rock You” are missing. The omissions underscore how superfluous Bohemian Rhapsody is.

The music has retained its urgent physicality. Still, it’s probably for the best that the Faint continue working at their recent leisurely pace of about an album every half decade, because this band burns through their ideas fast.

With TV on the Radio’s Kyp Malone on production, Islands polishes Durant’s sound to a resonant and gently rollicking gleam, brightened by dulcimer, guitar, brass, and woodwind. Durant’s songwriting is fine-boned and small-scale, and her lyrics are quietly epic.

Aguayo’s productions have frequently flashed a sly sense of humor, but the mood here is driven, focused, heads-down. His drum programming is as slinky as ever, but there’s a newfound force to it; his drums could double as battering rams.

It’s weird that “better than nothing” became the bar for what was once one of the most celebrated bands of their era, but if it’s a choice between more records as solid, if unspectacular, as Beneath the Eyrie or nothing, the Pixies might as well keep them coming. It’s been a long time since this band had anything left to lose.

For the most part, these covers are faithful, fine-tuned, and sound great. No track on Candid warps its original in a particularly wild or ambitious way; Whitney are more concerned with nailing these takes respectfully than fundamentally reimagining them.

Its mellow sway is alluring but it also can drift ever so slightly into the realm of mood music, perhaps an inevitable result for a gently restless musician who seems to favor feel over feeling.

Though his words reach for darker emotional valences, the album’s most honest moments come across in Carey’s compositions.

He delivers these lines like a seasoned storyteller, reminding himself of the timeless feelings that drive us to keep the music playing, whether it’s old or new.

TWIABP are now making the most technically proficient music of their career and admirably facing down some of the world’s most dire issues. But in the pursuit of radical evolution, they’ve forsaken the emotional dynamism that has consistently buoyed their music through their tumultuous history.

Heavy Rocks does the things you expect a Boris album to do.

The main issue with Songs is that, for an album of "songs," there are too few pop cuts to work well as a whole. It's more of a pick-and-choose affair where the modern ability to fast-forward to your favorite musical moments, down to the second, is crucial.

For now, the musically and emotionally rewarding Anything in Return evokes the feeling of being young with options and in no hurry to figure it all out.

On Fog, Arbouretum does well by both parties [his songwriting influences: singer Will Oldham, with whom he toured as a backing guitarist, and Baltimore punk-rock-Gnostics, Lungfish].

Williams' ostensible depthlessness, like that of his forebears, is itself only a façade, and Smoke offers plenty to discover across repeated listens--particularly the way in which he tweaks his own voice, melting and reshaping it like the models' Technicolor "tears" on the album cover.